Content for teachers and students about robotics in our world. Is robotics the Perfect Platform for 21st Century Learning? Read on!.. Would you like your student robotics activities presented here? Leave a comment or email me. And check out Robotics for Teachers PODCAST @ http://www.roboticsforteachers.com/

Thursday, April 28, 2016

Great article from Smithsonian magazine...

"How Lego Is Constructing the Next Generation of Engineers

With programmable robots and student competitions, Lego is making “tinkering with machines cool again”

There are no ballpoint grenade pens, no
wrist-mounted dart guns, no Aston Martins tricked out with smoke
screens, bulletproof glass, revolving license plates or ejector seats.
Still, the geek-approved contraptions at Lego’s research-and-development
facility in Billund, Denmark, are as covetable as anything cooked up by
Q Branch.

Q Branch, of course, is the section of Her Majesty’s Secret
Service (MI6) that supplies James Bond with fanciful gadgetry. The
headquarters of MI6 is a ziggurat-like fortress known within the
intelligence community as Legoland. It gets its name from the toy
company that has supplied earth with more than 600 billion tiny plastic
bricks—about 80 for each inhabitant. The Lego company’s own HQ is a
modest campus as neat and well-ordered as a quadratic equation. Huge
colored bricks—a corporate nod to art—lie scattered in tidy piles, and
simple rectangular buildings bear names like Idea House and Head Office.

Lego’s own MI6, its top-secret R & D
lab, is on the second floor of a drab brick structure called the Tech
Building. Inside, gearheads in jeans and fleece pullovers are surrounded
by enough electronic ganglia to jump-start Frankenstein’s monster. Amid
a spaghetti of wires and a blaze of red, green, blue, yellow and purple
blocks is an amazing array of robot prototypes, all capable of
exasperating behavior. Some of these marvels propel themselves on Lego
wheels; others skitter around on Lego legs. There’s a scorpionlike robot
that turns sharply, snaps its claws and searches for an infrared beacon
“bug.” There’s a Mohawked android that flings little red balls as it
rumbles. And there’s a fanged robot snake that, with the wave of a
smartphone, shakes, rattles and rolls. Dangle your cell in front of the
serpent’s head and it lunges to bite you.
All three gizmos are characters in Mindstorms EV3, the latest
update of a do-it-yourself kit that enables budding Edisons to assemble
robots, program them on PCs and Macs, and control them via Bluetooth,
downloadable apps and voice commands. Like any other Lego, Mindstorms
EV3 is a jumble of parts (nearly 600 separate elements) that can be
plugged together many ways. The toy, which clocks in at $350 and will be
in stores this fall, comes with 3-D interactive building instructions
for 17 different bots that walk, talk and stalk. And, this being Lego,
enterprising kids are encouraged to hack away and turn the components
into whatever they can dream up.

Once upon a time, teachers lacked the
tools to excite and engage pupils in engineering. And the technological
know-how required to put together a juddering robot limited the audience
to high-school and university students. That all changed in 1998 when
Lego launched its first wave of programmable bots. By the second wave,
in 2006, the programming language had become visual and kids could make
bots do pretty much anything simply by stringing directives together on a
computer. “Today a second grader can make her own wall-avoiding
triceratops in 20 minutes,” says Chris Rogers, a professor of mechanical
engineering at Tufts University.

With bricks, action and hues as vibrant as tropical sunsets, Lego
created a way for novices to learn the basics of structural
engineering: bracing, tension and compression, loading constraints,
building to scale. By combining Lego bricks to sensors, servo motors and
microprocessors, those novices can now explore everything from basic
pulleys and belts to computer programming. “Mindstorms EV3 makes
tinkering with machines cool again,” says Ralph Hempel, author of Lego Spybiotics Secret Agent Training Manual.
Mindstorms encourages young tinkerers to play their way into
robotics. “It puts no limits on your fantasies,” says Niels Pugholm, a
Danish college student who’s been playing with Legos from the time he
was old enough to know he shouldn’t swallow them. “Most toys pre-tell a
story; Mindstorms is exploratory and has no set rules. If I construct a
Mars rover robot, I can rebuild it into a robotic arm and then a robotic
humanoid. Lego robotics is a sneaky educational way to learn about
design, planning, construction and, most importantly, reconstruction.”
In Denmark, he says, it’s obligatory for a child to build a Babel Tower
out of Legos that “inevitably gets demolished.”

The EV3 is the third generation of ­demolishable Mindstorms, and
the second that’s been crowd-sourced. “The power of many,” says
Marc-André Bazergui, one of a dozen Lego citizen developers—who call
themselves the 12 Monkeys—impaneled to design the latest edition. Over
the years, the many have fashioned Lego bots that solve Rubik’s Cubes,
sort M&M’s by color and convert conventional toilets into
robo-flushers.

Part of the so-called “maker movement,” Mindstorms’ fanatic
online community shares ideas by uploading plans for new creations to
Lego forums and posting videos to YouTube. Across the globe,
schoolchildren belong to leagues and hold tournaments in which teams are
challenged to design, build and program a Lego robot to complete a
specific task related to a theme like climate control or transportation
safety. In the United States, competitions are run by FIRST (For
Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology), a nonprofit
founded by the seemingly inexhaustible inventor Dean Kamen (creator of
the Segway scooter). Every spring FIRST holds championships in four
robotics divisions, spanning ages 6 to 18. At this year’s three-day Lego
block party at the Edward Jones Dome in St. Louis, 650 teams vied for
robotic superiority and more than $16 million in scholarships to 140
colleges..."

Click on book cover for information

Getting Started with LEGO Robotics. Anyone who
works with kids can do LEGO Robotics, a rich and highly motivating
platform for important STEM Learning! (surprisingly affordable, too)
This books explains it all!

"Robotics is STEM" (Science Technology Engineering Math)

Click on book cover for information

Getting Started with LEGO Robotics. Anyone who
works with kids can do LEGO Robotics, a rich and highly motivating
platform for important STEM Learning! (surprisingly affordable, too)
This books explains it all!

China's 1st security & service robot

" Riot Control Robot Unveiled in China Looks Ominously Like a 'Doctor Who' Dalek, May In Fact Be One"

“China's first intelligent security robot debuts in Chongqing,” reads the headline in the Chinese Communist Party official newspaper People's Daily.
The riot control robot has a name, “AnBot,” and it's freaking everyone
out even more than your regular garden variety riot control robots
because the damn thing looks like a Dalek from Doctor Who. And nothing good comes from a Dalek.

Anyway, this thing looks ridiculous, and is getting tons of online
ridicule. Also it can only chase you down on flat surfaces, not stairs,
no robotic parkour moves. For now.

It was reported to be “capable of eight hours of continuous work” by People’s Daily, and who knows how long it takes to recharge. Is this even real.."

This one captures some of the great spirit of FIRST LEGO League and what it means to kids...

Block by block: LEGO robotics builds interest in STEM

Click on book cover for information

Getting Started with LEGO Robotics. Anyone who
works with kids can do LEGO Robotics, a rich and highly motivating
platform for important STEM Learning! (surprisingly affordable, too)
This books explains it all!

Tuesday, April 26, 2016

"World's cutest smartphone robot can be yours for a hefty price tag"

"RoBoHoN is adorable, can recognise your face, read your messages
aloud, wake you up and announce phone calls, but is probably out of your
price range...

The cutest robo-smartphone ever made is hitting shelves in Japan next month - but is it cute enough to drop almost £1,300?

RoBoHoN
(which translates roughly as “heart moving phone”) is an adorable tiny
robot, which doubles up as a smartphone. Or is it a smartphone that
doubles up as a robot?

Either way, the happy little bot is a surprisingly powerful piece of technology in its own right.

Created by Japanese electronics firm Sharp, RoBoHoN is a 20cm tall
robot phone. It’s capable of walking around your home or office (but
probably on a table rather than the floor) and acts as a small personal
assistant. It’ll read out phone messages, announce phone calls and even
shout at you when it’s time to wake up... "

Monday, April 25, 2016

"Google Robot Doesn’t Punch You if You Knock It Down. Yet."

"Boston Dynamics, the robotics company Google acquired in its mad
robotics spree two years ago, is very good at making robots that can
handle a surprise — or take a beating.
Here’s its latest. Meet Atlas, an upgraded version of its humanoid —
a five-foot-nine, 180-pound biped that walks upright, picks things up
and will probably elicit some gasps of awe and concern. Most robots are
good at repetitive tasks, but fail when something goes awry. Atlas
is designed to deal with extenuating circumstances.

You can watch it traipse through the snow, catching its balance on
the uneven terrain. Indoors, a handler knocks a box out of its hands;
Atlas moves over to retrieve it. When another human shoves it from
behind, Atlas pushes itself back up and walks on...."

Thursday, April 21, 2016

"Its developer says Root can teach even young children to write code..."

"...It’s no secret that coding is a bankable skill in Massachusetts.

The economy here is projected to add
more than 1,000 software development jobs annually through 2022, making
it the most abundant job category for college graduates behind
accountants, auditors, and management analysts.

Companies aren’t just hiring developers, they’re paying them
handsomely, too. Software developers’ median annual income is $112,780,
more than twice the national average according to the US Bureau of Labor
Statistics.

Still, the number of students studying computer science actually declined over the first part of the 21st century, data from the National Center for Education Statistics show. As a result, a wave of for-profit coding boot camps have cropped up in cities across the country to teach adults the skills they missed during their formal education.

The labor bureau says that by 2020 there will be a shortage of 1 million qualified coders to fill an estimated 1.4 million programming positions.

But if you ask Zivthan Dubrovsky, teaching coding during childhood,
when neural connections are developing at breakneck speed, is essential.

Enter,
Root, a code-teaching robot built by Dubrovsky and his small team at
the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard.

After more than three years in development and seven prototypes,
Root, a six-sided robot-on-wheels, made its formal debut Monday at a
prominent education technology summit in San Diego.

“Coding is
fundamentally important to this country, and it’s more than just flashy
webpages,” said Dubrovsky. He’s a former program and product marketing
manager at iRobot, where he helped commercialize the original Roomba.

“We
tried to make it fun for kids and easy for teachers who don’t code to
use Root and create and teach their own curriculum,” Dubrovsky said.

Root
is smaller than Roomba but looks and glides similarly to the vacuuming
bot. It’s small and low to the ground, with a center hole where a dry
erase marker goes. Root communicates via bluetooth with native software
loaded onto a tablet. It has magnetic wheels that let it “drive”
determinedly across classroom whiteboards, and some 20 sensors let it
interact with the environment and respond to students’ commands.

Though
the robot itself can be used by students of any age or coding
skill-level, Root’s software developer Julián da Silva says the app will
eventually have three levels that get more complex as students begin
learning to code. The final level will teach students how to write
text-based code.

For now, Root’s makers could only demonstrate
the software’s first level, where graphical blocks are dragged in line
to create a sequence that tells the robot how to behave. On this level,
Dubrovsky says children begin wrapping their minds around the “highly
abstract” concepts that underlie code.

Dubrovsky said even young
children understand the “if this, then that,” progression of action and
reaction, true in life as it is in coding. So on the first level, Root
lets children build up a sequence of “if” and “then” commands that the
robot plays out in real-time.

For example, a child working with
the app could drag and drop the graphical icon that tells Root to move
forward. If Root does, another icon could tell it then to glow red or
spin in a circle or sing a musical note.

Since coding relies on
this kind of conditional logic, Dubrovsky said even kindergarten
students can begin laying the groundwork for a future in programming. He
said his three young kids, whom he enlisted as early-stage testers,
reacted positively to the interactive robot and its “radically easy”
app.

Currently, Dubrovsky and his team are courting investors to
bring Root to market, which they say could happen in the second quarter
of next year. The system will cost $199 for schools and $249 for
individuals, who pay more for a roll-up whiteboard, which most schools
already in classrooms.

Tuesday, April 19, 2016

I don't see this as a replacement for the very rich practices of 'hands-on' building, open ended design, and programming... However, Robots and Robotics should be an ongoing theme that permeates student learning, picked up here and there and woven throughout the learning experience students receive over years. In that sense, simpler, easier items like The Robot Factory, things that give wing to imagination and reflection on important trends in contemporary technology and the way it impacts all our lives... things like this can offer great value for students.Mark The Robot Factory by Tinybop - Trailer

Robot Factory, The by Tinybop (App Review)

The Robot Factory - Best App For Kids - iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch

Monday, April 18, 2016

Here we have a group of research scientists who use LEGO robots to help them conduct their experiments. They rely on the robots which work wonderfully for them... the materials they chose to build them with? LEGO robotics materials! Let's have a look at how LEGO Robots function in the real world of real science.

How robots aid scientific research | LEGO

Saturday, April 16, 2016

Nice video... a bit of an insider look at Student Robotics with LEGO materials as an approach for crucial STEM Learning...

Robotic Legos Teach Elementary School Students STEM Skills

A good start... but there's much more!

Click on book cover for information

Getting Started with LEGO Robotics. Anyone who
works with kids can do LEGO Robotics, a rich and highly motivating
platform for important STEM Learning! (surprisingly affordable, too)
This books explains it all!

Thursday, April 14, 2016

As I was saying to the students in my graduate course 'The Instructional Technologist as School Leader' last night, in order for schools to keep up with the wonderful tech trends happening now so that they can offer kids wonderful, relevant learning experiences, the school Technology Teacher will need to embrace trending developments as they happen. I think all schools should have a robotics program and 3D printers are another, similar 'maker-related' activity type... one that most likely will go into the school's Computer Lab/Technology Room/Library Media Center... Here's and interesting crossover, 3D Printing and Robotics in one... the shape of school technology programs to come? :)

3D printer produces robot that gets up and walks away

It sounds like something out of a science fiction movie like "Blade
Runner." But researchers at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial
Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) have developed a new 3D printing process that creates robots that are fully functional from the moment they come off the printer.

The normal process for creating something complex and mobile like a robot through 3D printing
usually involves multiple print runs to make each component. After all
the pieces are printed out, then the object needs to be assembled. MIT's
new process is significant in that the production period is
streamlined, with the robot's solid and liquid hydraulic parts being
created in one step, according to a university press release.
A
paper on the research was just accepted to the Institute of Electrical
and Electronics Engineers' International Conference on Robotics and
Automation (ICRA), which will be held this summer. The paper was
co-authored by MIT postdoc Robert MacCurdy and Ph.D. candidate Robert Katzschmann, along with Harvard undergrad Youbin Kim.

"Our
approach, which we call 'printable hydraulics,' is a step towards the
rapid fabrication of functional machines," CSAIL Director Daniela Rus,
who oversaw the project, said in the release. "All you have to do is
stick in a battery and motor, and you have a robot that can practically
walk right out of the printer."
To model this single-step process,
the research team printed a small six-legged robot that is able to
crawl with the aid of 12 hydraulic pumps that are embedded in its body.

How does the printer work? An inkjet printer deposits drops of
material that are incredibly small -- less than half the width of a
single human hair. The object is printed layer by layer, bottom to top. High-intensity UV light
solidifies the materials -- with the exception of liquids -- used to
create the object. Within each layer is a photopolymer, which would
solidify, and a non-curing material or a liquid.

"Inkjet printing
lets us have eight different print-heads deposit different materials
adjacent to one another, all at the same time," MacCurdy explained. "It
gives us very fine control of material placement, which is what allows
us to print complex, pre-filled fluidic channels."

"As far as I'm concerned," he added, "inkjet-printing is currently the best way to print multiple materials."
The
robot that was ultimately produced weighs in at 1.5 pounds and is less
than 6 inches long. In order to make it mobile, a single DC motor is
included that spins a crankshaft that is used to pump fluid through the
machine's legs to power its movement.

"If you have a crawling
robot that you want to have step over something larger, you can tweak
the design in a matter of minutes," MacCurdy suggested. "In the future,
the system will hardly need any human input at all -- you can just press
a few buttons, and it will automatically make the changes."
Eventually,
MacCurdy said this kind of robot could be used in disaster relief
situations. It could be employed at a nuclear site or used to search the
scene of an earthquake.

"Reaching students on the autism spectrum

In addition to promoting early engagement in STEM for students,
robots can also help reach students with disabilities. Texas-based
company RoboKind has developed Milo, a robot that helps special ed
teachers interact with who are on the autism spectrum.

Milo looks like a person, with a range of facial features that allow realistc expression.He delivers pre-programmed research-based lessons that teach social
behaviors, helping elementary and middle school students understand the
meaning of emotions and expressions. The humanoid robot also can act as a
role model of sorts, demonstrating appropriate social behavior and
responses.

The concept underlying Milo’s usage is that students on the spectrum
can be generally more comfortable interacting with non-humans. That
means interacting with Milo facilitates a reduction in stress and
anxiety.
“Recent research has shown that children working with a therapist and
Milo are engaged 70-80% of the time,” the company RoboKind says,
“compared to just 3-10% of the time with traditional approaches...”

Click on book cover for information

Getting Started with LEGO Robotics. Anyone who
works with kids can do LEGO Robotics, a rich and highly motivating
platform for important STEM Learning! (surprisingly affordable, too)
This books explains it all!

Nice piece from EducationDIVE...

"Robots jumpstart learning in some US districts"

"For National Robot Week, a look at two approaches to incorporating robotics in the classroom

In honor of National Robot Week, Education
Dive took a look at two ways robots are being used in K-12 classrooms:
one that helps inspire student interest in coding and another that helps
children on the autism spectrum learn social-emotional skills.

'Teaching' robots tricks with code

Robots can certainly teach students, but can students teach robots?
That’s the idea behind a new competition called the Vermont Robot Rodeo, currently unfolding in the Green Mountain state.

It’s a collaborative project. For the rodeo, around fifty schools
across the state “host” a variety of robots, sharing their learning
strategies with each other on social media as the project progresses.
Schools can borrow robots and swap them out for different models.
The main goal of the competition is to provide a fun and interactive
way to get students coding so they can “train” their robots to perform a
stunt, which is generated with code, for the big Robot Rodeo, slated
for May.

Will Bohmann
is the Educational Technology Integration Specialist at the Center for
Technology, a tech high school in Essex, VT. He’s been experimenting
with a Wink robot from PlumGeek Software, designed to introduce programming to newbies and to work with experienced coders alike.
Wink uses an open source platform called Arduino IDE.

“I named my robot Ferris, because I had some challenges getting him to school each day,” Bohmann blogged.
“The challenge of setting up reminded me that sometimes Ferris just
needed a day off. Now that I've broken him in, he's been pretty
dependable and can do some exciting things.”Richmond Elementary School, Colchester Middle School, and St. Albans City School are participating.
Students at RES received their first robot, called a “cubelet,” in January 2016, and the experimentation began.

The
elementary school’s afterschool enrichment program experimented with
various “code-able” robots for six weeks, including Dash from
WonderWorks, Sphero, BeeBot, Cubelets and Ozobot, all borrowed from the
Vermont Robot Rodeo.“Students got to witness the direct response of
their inputs and commands as the robots physically reacted to their
code,” enrichment teacher Darcie Rankin, who directed the program, noted.
Rankin said "students had the option to continue coding robots or to
explore Hour of Code, Scratch or Minecraft” in the school's computer
lab, and students were able to move between options as they explored,
collaborated and learned. At RES, third-grade students in the school’s
enrichment program used robots to supplement learning about
electricity, then made a video featuring talking robots explaining the
concepts they learned.

At Colchester Middle School, students trained a robot called Dash for a month before sending him off to St. Albans.

Matt Gile, the school’s AV assistant, created a video encapsulating Dash’s time with Colchester students.
Erica Bertucci coordinates STEAM learning at St. Albans City School,
from grades pre-K-8. Although St. Albans owns six of their own robots,
they received a cubelet from the Robot Rodeo, and Bertucci was able to
incorporate it into exploration time even for her youngest students.
"The robot is programmed, in part, by how you put blocks together," she said.
Bertucci took out the cubes, and allowed her five-year-old students to figure out the robot themselves.
"They first said, oh look, blocks!" she recalled. "And then — magnets! They realized that they were magnetic blocks. Then, a light was blinking!"
Bertucci remained silent while the kids started experimenting and playing with the cubelet.
"They started guessing: Is it a robot? Why is it moving? Why isn’t it
moving?" she said. "That kind of problem-solving at that early level,
in a hands-on tangible way, it was so exciting."

In South Burlington’s Orchard School,
K-5 students spent five weeks training Dash/Dot, BB8, Spheros and Finch
robots. They also entered into an interstate partnership with schools
in Georgia and Connecticut, using Flipboards to challenge peers to teach
their own school robots.
The challenges presented by
Vermont students ranged from teaching robots the ABC’s to having them
say names. They also fielded challenges from the out-of-state students,
like this one, where a Finch was trained to spin in a circle..."

Click on book cover for information

Getting Started with LEGO Robotics. Anyone who
works with kids can do LEGO Robotics, a rich and highly motivating
platform for important STEM Learning! (surprisingly affordable, too)
This books explains it all!

Saturday, April 9, 2016

Couldn't resist a little nostalgia! The appeal of robots to kids, I guess, reaches out over the decades... this commercial is (yikes, I actually remember seeing it when I was 11) well over half a century old! "LOOK FOR YOUR ROBOT COMMANDO; HE'S LOOKING FOR YOU!!!" Enjoy:)

Thursday, April 7, 2016

A great way for kids to compete... using their Science - Technology - Engineering - and Math SKILLS and having fun!

Lego sumo 2012 RobotChallenge

Click on book cover for information

Getting Started with LEGO Robotics. Anyone who
works with kids can do LEGO Robotics, a rich and highly motivating
platform for important STEM Learning! (surprisingly affordable, too)
This books explains it all!

Cool robots made by tech savvy students

Click on book cover for information

Getting Started with LEGO Robotics. Anyone who
works with kids can do LEGO Robotics, a rich and highly motivating
platform for important STEM Learning! (surprisingly affordable, too)
This books explains it all!

"Arduino Powered Robot Orchestra Rocks Adele

A 17-year-old student from South Korea has created an amazing
electronic orchestra that performs some of the latest hits and nerdy
sounds from the game Undertale.
The orchestra is made up of various “instruments” that are improvised
from electronic components and a little creativity. The amount of work
that went into organizing the wiring alone is impressive, yet the whole
project will blow you away..

Tuesday, April 5, 2016

Good robots! Kids love this and there is so much crucial STEM Learning to be had from student robotics...

Click on book cover for information

Getting Started with LEGO Robotics. Anyone who
works with kids can do LEGO Robotics, a rich and highly motivating
platform for important STEM Learning! (surprisingly affordable, too)
This books explains it all!

Nice video of kids working with LEGO Robotics - Looks very much like thousands of similar student robotics activity groups I've observed over the years... Strange, the way the video producer cuts in those LEGO Action Figure animations, though... can't have it all, I suppose.

Why not make this happen for some kids you care about?

Click on book cover for information

Getting Started with LEGO Robotics. Anyone who
works with kids can do LEGO Robotics, a rich and highly motivating
platform for important STEM Learning! (surprisingly affordable, too)
This books explains it all!

Saturday, April 2, 2016

Want to put more fascination, inspiration, and excitation into STEM Learning for kids? This book is the way to get started...

Click on book cover for information

Getting Started with LEGO Robotics. Anyone who
works with kids can do LEGO Robotics, a rich and highly motivating
platform for important STEM Learning! (surprisingly affordable, too)
This books explains it all!

Click on book cover for information

Getting Started with LEGO Robotics. Anyone who works with kids can do LEGO Robotics, a rich and highly motivating platform for important STEM Learning! (surprisingly affordable, too) This books explains it all!